Toward Conceptualizing the Personal Relationship in Therapeutic Action: Beyond the “Real” Relationship

Abstract

There is far greater theoretical coherence and clinical value in the concepts of the personal (person-to-person) and the new relationship than in the earlier concept of the “real” relationship. To develop this thesis, the author traces the historical evolution of the concept of the “real” relationship, elucidates its meaning(s), and considers its problematic features in the light of a relational psychoanalytic perspective. Although the concept of the real relationship was originally derived from the objectivist assumptions of the classical psychoanalytic model, it has thrived with relational (intersubjective) theoretical advances. Ironically, its role has become elevated in theory and practice even as its meaning has been confounded, rather than clarified, by these advances. Conceptualizations of the personal and new relationships are proposed which far more effectively articulate the goals and methods of relational psychoanalysis.